254 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



little left for himself if he tried to keep a pair of horses to do 

 his work, unless, as suggested above, he is in a position to pro- 

 duce some agricultural specialty. He would likewise find a 

 reaping or a mowing machine a poor investment. The gen- 

 eral result of such small-scale staple farming is necessarily the 

 use of laborious and inefficient methods. 



However, a great increase in the agricultural population of 

 the country, which seems so desirable to some people, will nec- 

 essarily result in either the multiplication of small farms or of 

 agricultural laborers. If we are to have a wholesale increase in 

 the rural population anyway, the former may be, and probably 

 is, the more attractive alternative. It is the desire to escape 

 both alternatives which, more than anything else, explains the 

 movement from the country to the city, though doubtless less 

 commendable motives are frequently mixed with this one. It 

 is this motive undoubtedly which drives multitudes of people 

 from our own rural districts to the Canadian Northwest, where 

 land is still abundant. 



In so far as the movement from the country to the city 

 has the result of maintaining medium-scale farming rather than 

 small-scale farming on the one hand, or the formation of an ag- 

 ricultural proletariat on the other, it is a wholly commendable 

 movement, and all efforts to check it or to increase the agri- 

 cultural population beyond the point where medium-scale farm- 

 ing can be maintained, is wholly and extremely vicious. We 

 must therefore expect the surplus population to continue to 

 leave the rural districts. That is the only way by which a 

 high standard of rural living can be maintained. 



That medium-sized farms are more profitable than small farms 

 in a certain section of New York state has been conclusively 

 shown by Professor G. F. Warren of Cornell University, who 

 furnishes the following tables. They form a part of the results 

 of an agricultural survey of Tompkins County, New York. 



